A Gripping, Grotesque ‘Seagull’

The short-story writer Anton Chekhov liked to leave a great deal unsaid. The choreographer Boris Eifman says everything often and loudly. But the unlikely marriage between these two artists as well as their respective art forms yielded surprisingly solid results Wednesday night at City Center when Mr. Eifman’s troupe performed his ballet based on Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”Mr. Eifman is mindful that many of the greatest ballets are about people who dance for work or pleasure, such as “Giselle” or “La Bayadère”; here, he has transposed the setting from the Russian countryside into a ballet landscape of studios and dressing rooms, which are realized with panache and efficiency in Zinovy Margolin’s set design. Much of the plot and most of the characters have been discarded, but the essential coordinates of Chekhov’s play remain in Mr. Eifman’s two-act ballet.The story hinges on the quadrangle, the first corner of which is Mme. Arkadina, a great star of the commercial theater (here a renowned ballerina). Her lover, Trigorin, is a writer at the pinnacle of his renown, but acutely aware of his own limitations ( here he is an established choreographer). Mme. Arkadina’s son Konstantin Treplev is a zealous young theatrical visionary, who both despises his mother’s compromises of thought and artistic endeavor (here a untutored young choreographer) and desperately seeks validation from her. And Treplev’s muse is an aspiring actress Nina Zarechnaya, whose ideals are bruised by her experience in the commercial theater, now a young dancer, a rival both for Arkadina’s elite position as well as her lover and her son’s affections.Chekhov’s eponymous bird — in Chekhov’s telling, it is brought down by Treplev in his rage at what he perceives as Nina’s indifference — is here from the opening of the ballet associated with Konstantin, depicted as a caged bird himself when the curtain rises and he is seen trapped and contorted inside an aluminum cube. Chekhov’s play opens with a disastrous performance that Treplev stages outdoors on his mother’s country estate; here that becomes an Alwin Nikolais, “Help Help the Globolinks” affair of dancers encased in enormous tents and tubes of fabric.It goes without saying that for the most part, the half tones, the light and shade, the ambiguities of Chekhov are not there. Granted, these subtleties are nearly impossible to translate into physical movement, but the conflict and torment are told with robust theatricality. Mr. Eifman’s love of the grotesque is evident in the body language he gives Treplev, who might here be a psychiatric inmate or even a Quasimodo. Not surprisingly, Mr. Eifman emphasizes the Oedipal tension between Arkadina and her son more than it appears in the play.Throughout the two acts, Mr. Eifman supplies his characteristic rubber-jointed solos and duets full of distorted shapes meant to convey tortured emotion, and he retools his signatures with economy and even finesse. For the most part, Mr. Eifman resists his propensity to overkill, and when he doesn’t — when Konstantin screams out loud at the end — the effect is all the more dramatic for its sparing use. In Act 1, for reasons that are not altogether clear but surely include Mr. Eifman’ s desire to show his company’s versatility, the ensemble breaks out in a bacchanalia of hip-hop. Watching the Russians tear into this sideshow, the veteran dancegoer might well think, “Now I have seen everything.”The performances are all outstanding: Dmitri Fisher as Treplev, Maria Abashova as Nina, Nina Zmievets as Arkadina, and Mr. Eifman’s indefatigable corps de ballet. Perhaps most vivid of all Wednesday night was Yuri Smelakov as Trigorin. Mr. Smekalov has come a long way since he first danced in New York in 1998 as a graduating student of St. Petersburg’s Vaganova Academy.As Mr. Eifman’s “Seagull,” reaches its conclusion, Nina is degraded, performing in a nouveau-riche night spot, Arkadina remains trapped in her blinkered narcissism, while Trigorin’s powers are somehow rejuvenated in the ballet studio. Konstantin does not commit suicide, as he does in the play; instead Mr. Fisher simulates the foundering of a wounded bird, and retreats back into his womb or cell-suggesting geometric cube.Until April 29 (West 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-581-1212).

A Gripping, Grotesque ‘Seagull’

A Gripping, Grotesque ‘Seagull’

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